Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 59, No. 1. Whole No. 338, January 1972

Last Harvest by Joan Richter{©1971 by Joan Richter.}

A story about two young people of today: Sheila and Jack understood each other very well — perhaps too well; but, as often happens in a close relationship, only the tip of the iceberg was visible…

He leaned back against the kitchen counter of the one-room apartment they shared off campus. His thumbs were hooked deep into the pockets of his levis. “I’ve got to go. There’s no Way out of it.”

She looked up from the book in her lap, open to the same page it had been when he’d walked into the apartment fifteen minutes ago. She closed the book and put it on the floor beside her and uncrossed her legs from their lotus position. Slowly she stretched out and rested back on her elbows. Her dark hair fell in a silky drape past her shoulders and settled in a shiny pool on the floor beneath her.

They were almost mirror images of each other — young, lean, levied. Their sweatshirts were different. His was gray. Hers was a light blue, the same sky hue of her eyes.

“Look, I don’t want to go,” he said.

She stared at him critically, the expression on her face a challenge. “Then don’t.”

He straightened and freed his thumbs, slamming the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. “You know it isn’t that easy!”

“Who said anything about it being easy? But I don’t think it’s as hard as you’re trying to make out. There are three of them. That should be enough. If they want to take the chance, let them. They don’t need you.”

“They need the car.”

“Lend it to them.”

“My car? Are you kidding?”

“All right then. Let them find someone else who has a car. Let them rent one — if the car is what makes you think you have to go.”

The chill was fading from her voice. She heard the fading and she knew he’d heard it. She wasn’t going to lecture him anymore, she wasn’t going to ask him not to go. She had been on the verge of begging him and she’d never done anything like that before. In a way it had frightened them both.

He crossed the space between them and knelt beside her. He touched her hair and looked deeply into her eyes. His voice was soft. “I know what you’re saying. I hear you. And I understand. But I can’t pull out, not now. There isn’t time for them to get anyone else. Tonight’s the last of it. There’ll be a frost tonight and rain tomorrow. That’ll finish it until next year.”

He looked away from her, out the window. “The sky’s clouding up. I hope it holds out for a few more hours.” Absent-mindedly his hand slid down the length of her hair and then began to trace the familiar curves of her body. With a sigh he sank down on the floor alongside her.

Next year, she was thinking to herself as she lay beside him; that’s right, there’s next year — one last year of college and another harvest. “You told them what I found out about old man Purdy?”

“I told them.”

“What did they say? How are they going to handle that?” She sat up, leaning on one elbow, looking down at him. “What are they going to do about the farmer?”

“Look, Purdy isn’t going to be any problem.”

“What do you mean no problem? What have they decided to do about him?”

“Oh, come on, Sheila, stop giving me the third degree.” He tried to roll away from her, but she straddled him, pinning him down with her hands on his shoulders.

“Tell me. I’ve got a right to know. If it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t know anything about Purdy, you—” She paused, hearing her own new choice of word. All along she had been talking about them, as though Jack were not a part of it. But he was. A cold wire of fear caught in her throat. “What are you going to do to him?”

He sprang up, knocking her away from him. “Nothing, damn it! What’s the matter with you? What kind of guy do you think I am?” He stood above her, staring down at her angrily, ignoring the fact that she was holding her elbow which had hit the hard floor with a sharp crack.

She grimaced against the pain and fought the tears that sprang into her eyes. She swallowed and got her voice under control. This was her last chance to convince him. “Didn’t you understand what I told you! Purdy will be waiting for you. Every night for the last two weeks he’s been sitting on that back porch of his, waiting. If you know there’ll be a frost tonight, so does he. He’ll know tonight’s your last chance. He’ll be there with his spyglass just like that little kid said. He’ll spot you and go right to the phone and call the police.” She didn’t go into what getting caught would mean. She’d been over it all before — prison for God knows how many years.

“He may try, but he won’t get anywhere. We’re going to cut the telephone wires — and just in case he decides to use his car we’re letting the air out of his tires.”

She stared at him, the words registering. She almost laughed. They weren’t going to hurt the old man. She hadn’t thought of anything so simple — only a prank, really. She was so relieved that even the pain in her arm was nothing, but then almost as quickly as her relief had come, it was leaving her. She had lost the argument.

There was nothing else she could say now that would keep him from going. She was left only with the hope that everything would go all right, that when dawn came tomorrow she would wake and he would be beside her and it would be all over and done with. And when the Christmas holidays came two months from now she could look back and smile at all her fears — the money Jack would make on the deal would enable them to leave the bleak winter prairie for a couple of weeks and drive south into Mexico, seeking the sun.

She let her imagination float with the fantasy, needing it to blot out the terrifying alternative. When they would recross the border back into the States, the border guards would check again and again, as they had last year; but they’d find nothing, because there would be nothing to find. They might question the stack of Mexican newspapers on the floor of the trunk compartment, but discovering that’s all they were — newspapers — they would not even be interested in Jack’s explanation that he was doing a paper on Mexican journalism for a college course. Who would suspect that the destiny of the Zaragoza and San Pedro papers would be to wrap prairie-grown marijuana — so it could pass for the higher-priced Mexican variety.

A cold wind tore at their jackets when they left the apartment a few hours later. The sun had almost set and the sky was streaked with dark clouds. They walked to the car together, paused, exchanged a silent glance, then Sheila turned and rounded the corner where she could get a bus to another part of town.

The envelope of census material was under her arm. She didn’t know if she’d make any calls, but she might try. The temporary census job didn’t pay badly and she could fit the interviews in when it was convenient. Like now, if she wanted. She would go out of her mind if she stayed in the apartment alone, waiting.

Usually the questions and answers went easily. But sometimes not. Like when she had gone out to the Purdy farm two weeks ago where Brewster Purdy and his sister Elizabeth lived. It had been chance that she’d been given the group of five farms to do. If it hadn’t been that she had Jack’s car to use she’d have had to turn it down. It was a long drive, more than an hour in a direction out of town they rarely went.

You really couldn’t call the Purdy place a farm any more. The last hog had been slaughtered years ago. Purdy still planted a garden — beans, potatoes, corn — but most of his land had been let go. Wheat and cornfields had been overrun by what the old farmers still called locoweed.

It was Elizabeth Purdy who answered the doorbell the day Sheila pulled up to the farmhouse in Jack’s old beat-up car.

“No one’s rung that bell in years,” the gray-haired woman said with a hesitant smile. “It’s a wonder it works. Most people use the knocker.”

Sheila had smiled. “I’m from the city. There aren’t many knockers there. I guess I’m used to ringing doorbells. Are you Miss Purdy?”

The woman nodded.

“My name is Sheila Evans. I’m helping out with the census.” She showed her identification card.

“Who’s that?” a voice bellowed from somewhere inside the house.

The small gray woman colored and leaned toward Sheila. “That’s my brother. He’s in a ornery mood today. Worse than usual. He’s been like that ever since the Federal government took away his subsidy. It never made no sense to me for the government to pay him for not plantin’. It didn’t seem right, but then Brewster said I never had a head for such things. It’s hard, though, when you’re used to havin’ money come in and then suddenly it stops. It’s worse on people like the Stocktons down the road with all those little kids to feed. — It’s a young lady,” Elizabeth Purdy called over her shoulder. “She’s come about the census.”

A small wiry man appeared in the doorway. He was an inch or so shorter than his sister. It was hard for Sheila to believe that such a small body could house such a loud voice. His hostile gray eyes studied her and she knew it had not been worth her trouble to change out of her shirt and jeans. His scrutiny declared that her beige wool suit and brown pumps didn’t make her any more acceptable to him than if she were barefoot and bikini-clad.

“You say you’ve come about the census?”

“Yes, there are just a few questions I have to ask.”

“Well, I’ve got one to ask you. When’s the government goin’ to give me back my subsidy?”

Sheila shook her head and tried a small smile. “I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about that.”

“You don’t? Why not? You work for the government, don’t you?”

“Well, not really. I’m just—”

He wouldn’t let her finish. “If you don’t work for the government then you have no business cornin’ here askin’ us questions. I’ve a mind to call the police.”

Sheila suppressed a sigh and decided it would be best to ignore the old man. She turned to his sister. “Does anyone else live here besides you and your brother?”

She got her answer and left, with the old man yelling out the door, threatening that she wouldn’t get far, that he would have the police after her.

The Stockton place was the next on her list and she drove the two miles slowly, thinking about the old pair she had just left, wondering if there had ever been any happy times in their lives, wondering if the harsh life of the prairie had squeezed all the joy out of them — or maybe there had never been any joy to begin with.

October can be a pretty time in some farming areas, particularly in the northeast, with pumpkins and squash stacked in spilling hills of greens and golds, and farm stands tapestried with the rich colors of apples and pears. But not in the prairie states, Sheila thought to herself as she looked at the flat land, stubbled and browning. Any farm stand would become weathered and deserted, a wind catch on a blustery plain.

She turned into a rutted driveway marked by a mailbox whose black letters were chipped and faded. The name Stockton was barely distinguishable.

A brown and white spotted dog leaped playfully at her heels when she got out of the car. As she leaned down to pat its head, she heard the wail of a siren and turned to see a black and white police car, its red domelight flashing, turn into the driveway and screech to a halt, showering dust. The occupants of the farmhouse spilled out into the yard — a half dozen children and a thin woman in a faded blue print dress. The gaunt wind-burned man beside her was dressed in a pair of ragged coveralls.

“What’s the trouble, George?” he asked with a curious glance at Sheila.

“Don’t know yet. Just answering a call from Purdy.” The patrolman turned to Sheila. “You the little lady who’s just been to the Purdy place?”

She nodded. “He said he’d have the police after me, but I didn’t think he meant it. I’m a census taker, but I don’t think Mr. Purdy believed that.” She unclipped the identification card from the folder under her arm.

The policeman looked at it and frowned. “Have to satisfy a man like Purdy. He makes a lot of noise. Sometimes what he has to say is worth listening to.”

He left then and Mrs. Stockton took Sheila’s arm. “I bet you could use a cup of coffee after that scare. Come on into the house. No need for George to have used his siren like that. You’d think he was chasing some criminal. Gave me a fright the way he pulled into the driveway, throwing dust all over the place. Smart aleck, that’s what he is, uniform or no.”

“He’s just doing his job, Amy, same as anyone,” Mr. Stockton said wearily. “Only he’s gotta jazz it up a bit.”

He held a chair out for Sheila and she sat down at a wooden table whose finish had been worn by repeated washings. There was a plate of cupcakes in the center, freshly iced. There were eight of them, one for each member of the family. Now they had a guest. Sheila looked around at the faces of the children, roundeyed, semicircled by shadows. They were thin and looked tired, just as their mother and father looked tired.

With a pang Sheila realized she was looking close into the face of poverty and there was nothing she could do about it, except drink the coffee that was being poured for her and hope they would believe her when she said she’d just had lunch and was too full to eat one of the cupcakes they invited her to have.

“Old man Purdy is getting on,” Mrs. Stockton said. “He’s starting to have some foolish notions. Seems worse since they took away the subsidies.” She turned to the tallest of her sons who appeared to Sheila to be about twelve. “I want you kids to stay away from there. Don’t pester that old man none.”

“We don’t pester him, Ma,” the boy answered. “We just watch him from the old barn.”

“Watch him? Watch him doing what?”

“He sits out on that back porch of his all day long watchin’ the road along by the old railroad tracks. Sometimes a car stops and some big kids get out and cut down the loco weed that’s growin’ there. They fill up the car and take off. Ol’ man Purdy has his spyglass on them and then he calls the police. The kids get picked up and Purdy gets a reward.”

Stockton leaned forward and looked at his son. “Are you sure about this, Willie?”

“I’m sure. And there’s something else. You know that cornfield behind his house, the one he didn’t plant this year? It’s full of locoweed growin’ real thick. He’s just waitin’ for somebody to come and get that. He stays out on that porch even after dark, waitin’.”

“How do you know that, Willie?” His father’s voice was stern.

Willie’s thin face whitened. “Sorry, Pa. We won’t do it again, but Jim and I snuck up to the house the other night and saw him sittin’ there.”

The boy next to Willie nodded his head. “He had his pipe goin’ and ever’ once in a while we could see it glow up. Say, Pa, how much money do you get for bein’ an informer?”

Mr. Stockton raised his hand, then remembering their guest, he lowered it.

Sheila had her collar turned up against the wind and was glad when she saw the bus come round the comer. It was colder than she had thought. She should have worn a sweater. She found a seat by the window and stared out at the darkening evening trying to get her thoughts under control. The bus was warm, but she was still cold and she knew it was a different kind of chill that she felt — not from the outside, but from within.

The Purdy place was the last on her list. All the others, marked carefully on the map made from scoutings done early in the summer, had been hit and harvested. The stalks were hanging in garages and apartments and dormitories, upside down, so the sap could flow into the leaves, drying, waiting to be processed. There was none in the apartment she shared with Jack. He’d given in to her on that. Only the Mexican papers they’d bought last year were under the bed they shared, dusty and beginning to yellow. They would be used soon, if everything went as planned.

She got out at the bus stop she’d intended, but now that she was there she didn’t feel like ringing doorbells. It was too late anyhow. People would be having supper. She went into a diner, found an empty booth, and ordered a hamburger and coffee. She could see the street from where she sat and the comer where the bus had stopped. She could have stayed on the bus, gone to the end of the line, and come back, but she hadn’t thought of it. The coffee came and the hamburger. She ate it, thinking of the Stocktons and their thin faces and hungry stomachs. Her own churned with a new and wild fear.

It was two o’clock in the morning and the place in the bed beside her was empty. The apartment was lonely and still. She got up and went to the window. Against the street lamp she could see a light swirl of snow. Jack had been right about the frost. She looked down the street hoping to see the lights of his jalopy come round the corner. She stayed there a long time, watching, waiting.

When dawn came and she was still there and Jack hadn’t come, she knew for certain that something had gone wrong. But she didn’t know what and she didn’t know how to go about finding out. She couldn’t call the police to ask if they’d picked someone up named Jack Finley. What if they hadn’t? Maybe Jack had managed to get away.

At ten o’clock she took the bus to school and got off at the south end of the campus. She wanted to walk. The sun was out and the air was crisp. The yellow roses that bloomed along the path leading to the library were brown and withered, their heavy heads drooping, hit by last night’s frost.

A group of students she didn’t know came down the library steps. One of them was carrying a transistor radio and she listened for a moment to a snatch of a song that Jack sometimes whistled while he shaved. The melody lingered in her head after she could no longer hear it.

And then suddenly it hit her and she began running back along the walk to where she had got off the bus, where she could get another that would take her back to the apartment. If she were lucky she’d be there by eleven, in time for the news.

She burst into the apartment and snapped on the radio. It was two minutes past eleven.

A voice came on, oddly familiar, a child’s voice, frail, earnest. “I’m gonna get myself a bicycle. That’s what I’m going to do with part of it. The rest I’m gonna give to my Pa.”

Her breath caught as she listened and in her mind she saw the small, thin, white face of the little boy, remembering him as he had asked, “Say, Pa, how much money do you get for bein’ an informer?”